Welcoming Jill Szuchmacher, seasoned fiber-to-the-home exec

I am extremely excited to welcome Jill Szuchmacher to the Tucows executive team. I have known Jill for many years and have always found her to be a fellow traveler on the journey towards the future of Internet networks. We share a vision of not just the business of fiber networks, but the role they play in society more broadly.

Jill was most recently Vice President of Operations at Google Fiber. There she led strategy, planning, training and analytics for build and field operations. As CSO and EVP Networks for Ting Internet, she will be responsible for our Construction, builds, our pipeline of new Ting towns and for helping me plot the course for the coax to fiber transition that will change the broadband landscape over the next decade.

This is a key leadership role for Ting Internet and for Tucows. The need for fast, reliable Internet access has never been more apparent. 2020 squeezed years of latent change into months. We have an installation backlog as more people want fiber Internet than we can install. We have a pipeline backlog as more cities and towns want fiber Internet than we can build. Jill is precisely the leader we need right now, to ramp and scale Ting Internet, and the Construction, company we are building inside an Internet company, to meet these opportunities.

There is consensus among those participating in the coax to fiber transition—infrastructure funds, private equity firms, bankers, consultants, and suppliers—that the scarce resource is not capital and it’s not opportunity but rather it’s management. We continue to believe that we have the best management team in the world—from our strong core of people who’ve been involved in the ISP space since the early days of dialup—to newer additions with comprehensive industry management experience.

Jill was eager to join the Ting Internet team because she saw the same thing. The best team taking on this generational challenge. This was true before Jill joined us and now it is MUCH more true! We are all excited.

Szuchmacher is based in New York where she will work with colleagues at Ting Internet’s offices in Toronto, across the U.S. and around the world.